SPEAKER_00: Praise the Lord and welcome to this second week of the month of March.
SPEAKER_00: We are so grateful to what the Lord continues to accomplish in our midst and especially through his word.
SPEAKER_00: And today, looking at the theme of this month, the liberating power of sacrifice, bloodline connected, we are drawing a passage from Isaiah chapter 53, verse 1 to 5.
SPEAKER_00: And the Bible says, Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
SPEAKER_00: He grew up before him like a tender shoot and like a root out of dry ground.
SPEAKER_00: He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
SPEAKER_00: He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain.
SPEAKER_00: Like one from whom people hide their faces, he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
SPEAKER_00: But then verse 4 and 5 speaks about the sacrifice that this Son of God, the Son of God, ultimately paid for us, and he paid for our freedom.
SPEAKER_00: So verse 4 says, Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering.
SPEAKER_00: Yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him and afflicted.
SPEAKER_00: But he was pierced for our transgressions.
SPEAKER_00: And it continues to say that he was crushed for our iniquities.
SPEAKER_00: The punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.
SPEAKER_00: This passage brings to us the sacrifice of our freedom.
SPEAKER_00: That through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross, this one who was despised, this one who was rejected, this one of whom there was nothing that was attractive to draw us to himself, this is the one that bought our freedom.
SPEAKER_00: And Isaiah presents, at least in that passage, four areas of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: The first one being that through this sacrifice, Jesus secured our freedom from pain and suffering.
SPEAKER_00: The consequence of sin, the first consequence of sin is pain and suffering.
SPEAKER_00: And so in Jesus Christ, we have hope beyond our pain.
SPEAKER_00: We have hope beyond our suffering, because we know that in him, he has already taken the power of pain and suffering.
SPEAKER_00: We may suffer momentarily, but you cannot compare that to the glory that awaits us because of this sacrifice that has defeated pain and suffering.
SPEAKER_00: But then Isaiah also reminds us that this sacrifice has also given us freedom from the grip of sin.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why he's talking about transgressions.
SPEAKER_00: He's talking about iniquities, that we have been rescued, we have been liberated from the power of sin and from the power which comes through transgressions and iniquities.
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, we have the capacity now, because of this freedom, to overcome sin and the effect of sin in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: But number three, Isaiah also presents a third freedom, which is the freedom from conflict and trouble.
SPEAKER_00: And that is why the Bible is saying that this punishment is the one that brought us peace.
SPEAKER_00: It brought us peace with ourselves, it brought us peace with one another.
SPEAKER_00: It brought us peace with God.
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, we are not walking in conflict.
SPEAKER_00: We are not walking with troubled hearts.
SPEAKER_00: We know that in him we have peace through this freedom that this sacrifice has bought secured for us.
SPEAKER_00: But finally, Isaiah says that, and by his wounds we are healed.
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, we have freedom from sickness.
SPEAKER_00: We have freedom from physical sickness.
SPEAKER_00: We have freedom from spiritual sickness.
SPEAKER_00: And my brother, my sister, I want to encourage you to know that should you be going through a physical ailment, a spiritual ailment, we have freedom from it.
SPEAKER_00: We have hope.
SPEAKER_00: And there is nothing that is impossible with Jesus as far as our sicknesses are concerned, because his wounds are the wounds of healing.
SPEAKER_00: And therefore, this is the sacrifice of freedom.
SPEAKER_00: May you walk in these four areas of freedom: freedom from pain and suffering, freedom from the grip of sin, freedom from conflict and trouble, and freedom from sickness, whether physical or spiritual, in Jesus' name.